Person · d. 1195 A.H. / 1781 A.D., Lucknow — no birth date is recorded by any contemporary or early biographer · poet — satirist and qasida-writer; Malak-ush-shuara (poet laureate) of Awadh

Mirza Muhammad Rafi 'Sauda'

مِرزا مُحمّد رفِیع سَودا

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Sauda, a Delhi merchant's son left the collapsing Mughal capital in old age and died at Lucknow as Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah's poet laureate.

In the Sudder bazaar there is a fool, / A disgrace to physicians, and a scandal to the practice of medicine; / His form is like that of the devil, and his name is Ghaus — the opening lines of his masnavi satirizing the physician Muhammad Ghaus, as literally translated by Major Henry Court (Court, 1872, p.1).

What the sources did afterwards. No contemporary or subsequent biographer recorded when Sauda was born. Ram Babu Saksena, working through the earlier tazkiras, found 'no definite record of the length of his life and no date of his birth is mentioned by his contemporary or subsequent biographers'; the date usually repeated for him, 1125 A.H./1713, is only Azad's later 'conjecture' (Saksena, 1927, p.61).

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From Delhi to Lucknow

Mirza Muhammad Rafi took Sauda — 'melancholy' — as his pen name, a play on his merchant father's trade, 'sauda' also meaning 'merchandise' (Saksena, 1927, p.61). Raised in Delhi, he studied first under Sulaiman Quli Khan 'Widad' and then under Shah Hatim, who named him 'at the top of the list of his pupils appended to his Diwan' (Saksena, 1927, p.61). When 'a revolution set in in Delhi' and, amid Afghan and Maratha raids, 'life, property, and honour were not safe,' Sauda joined the poets' exodus from the city, leaving 'when about 60 years of age' for the court of Nawab Bangash Khan of Farrukhabad before finally settling at Lucknow in 1185 A.H. (1772 A.D.) in the service of Nawab Shujauddaula (Saksena, 1927, p.61).

Poet laureate, and a life the sources never dated

At Lucknow, under Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah, Sauda was granted 'an annual stipend of six thousand rupees and the conferment on him of the high title of Malak-ush-shuara the prince of poets' (Saksena, 1927, p.62); Saksena records that 'Sauda died at Lucknow in 1195 A.H. (1781 A.D.)' (Saksena, 1927, p.62). Yet the same page that gives his death year admits no one fixed his birth: 'there is no definite record of the length of his life and no date of his birth is mentioned by his contemporary or subsequent biographers' (Saksena, 1927, p.61). His voice survives directly only in translation — the school edition of his Kulliyat opens his satire on a Delhi physician with the couplets 'In the Sudder bazaar there is a fool, / A disgrace to physicians, and a scandal to the practice of medicine' (Court, 1872, p.1).

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